ON MYTHS AND MOZART
The real story behind the legendary composer’s final act
Most of the myths about Mozart — perpetuated by Peter Shaffer’s play and film Amadeus — focus on the final year of his life, 1791: The feud with murderously envious Salieri, his flighty wife Constanze, his suspicious death, his pauper’s grave.
And while one might not go so far as scholar Volkmar Braunbehrens, who said “not a single word, scene or location, to say nothing of the behaviour and appearance displayed (in Shaffer’s version) have anything to do with historical reality,” it is true that all these notions are profoundly misleading.
What can’t be denied is that 1791 dawned to find Mozart, at the age of 35, in a strange position. On the one hand, his genius was scaling new peaks of originality. In January, he gave the first performance of the celestial Piano Concerto No. 27. Three months later, he produced the fierce E-flat String Quintet, churning out in the interim a stream of songs and dances to pay the bills.
On the other hand, he had a lot of trouble. Constanze had health worries as well as expensive tastes and was pregnant for the sixth time, while his eldest son Karl was at a costly boarding school. To live in Vienna and keep up appearances, Mozart needed a lot of money — something he had always been careless with.
His fame had spread across Europe and his music was played in every capital city. But before the age of copyright, these performances earned him not a penny.
After his quarrel with the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart was determined to avoid the drudgery of working, like his senior colleague Joseph Haydn, as a salaried composer in an aristocratic household. But his insistence on personal freedom came at the cost of insecurity and reliance on irregular commissions, fees as a freelance pianist and teaching private pupils.
In good times, he might have made an excellent living out of this portfolio, but Austria’s war with the Ottoman Empire was draining money out the city. And Viennese musical culture was changing: With fewer princes maintaining their own private orchestras and a glut of commercial dance bands, there was less demand for symphonies and more for short-order waltzes and minuets. Mozart had to work not only harder, but faster and on a smaller scale.
A lucrative position as head of music at St. Stephen’s Cathedral fell through when the incumbent refused to die as expected. An offer from a London impresario for a six-month residency and two new operas had to be rejected because of family commitments. As the bills mounted, Mozart had to beg loans from his fellow Freemasons — a guild of men unpopular with the government owing to their suspected French Revolutionary sentiments.
But change was in the air, and Mozart was determined to take advantage of it. The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II had died in 1790, to be succeeded by his liberal brother Leopold II. In September 1791, he would be crowned as King of Bohemia in Prague and the parliament there wanted a new opera for the attendant festivities.
Salieri had been first choice as its composer, but he had turned it down, so by the time the invitation was delivered to Mozart, time was running short — only two months remained. Even though he hadn’t finished composing Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), the offer was so good he couldn’t refuse.
In the circumstances, there was no chance of finding a new libretto, he decided to take a familiar existing text by Metastasio called La clemenza di Tito — already set at least 40 times since it was written in 1734. The plot focuses on an ancient Roman emperor who shows mercy toward a young man misled by a jealous woman into joining a conspiracy to assassinate him.
It was stiff and old-fashioned, and to shape it up the hack Caterino Mazzola was brought in to make some speedy edits, specifically to allow Mozart to include more of the duets, trios and ensembles that showcased his genius.
As so often, he would be composing against the clock. Much of his coach journey to Prague was spent scribbling down ideas. The overture would be written at the very last minute.
The première was a disaster, not least as the king arrived an hour late. A courtier described the opera as “very boring.” The Emperor’s wife, Maria Luisa, thought it “so bad that almost all of us went to sleep.”
There was an inadequate castrato in the lead of Sesto and a problematic prima donna as Vitellia, who, according to one commentator, “sang more with her hands than with her throat.” But like so many first nights, this one proved misleading. La clemenza di Tito quietly established itself. One of Mozart’s first biographers, FX Niemetschek, wrote that “connoisseurs are in doubt whether Tito does not in fact surpass Don Giovanni.”
But with the Napoleonic ban on castrati and a new culture of liberalism, Clemenza fell out of fashion until the mid-20th century, when it was reassessed for its melodic beauty and originality. Many directors have mined it for ironies and ambiguities. Controversial new productions by Claus Guth and Peter Sellars this summer are only the latest in a long line of modernist reinterpretations.
Mozart returned to Vienna after the première at the end of September. During the last two months of his life, he was furiously productive, polishing off Die Zauberflote, which proved an enormous hit with a non-aristocratic audience in a suburban theatre. He also wrote the enchanting clarinet concerto and started a requiem, commissioned anonymously by a nobleman grieving for his wife.
So things were looking up — until various ailments killed him within two weeks on Dec. 5.
He owed money all over town, but he wasn’t buried in a pauper’s grave. Regulations at the time insisted for hygiene reasons that everyone should be buried in mass cemeteries outside city walls.